Whining Groundswell complain while planet burns

Groundswell NZ to hit the road again

Groundswell NZ co-founders Bryce McKenzie and Laurie Paterson will be climbing back on tractors for another nationwide trek, but this time their message is for voters.

The pair led the major Howl of a Protest journey in July 2021, opposing the Government’s rural sector regulations and policies, followed by another nationwide event, the Mother of All Protestsin November that year.

Nothing had improved since then, McKenzie said.

“There hasn’t been anything wound back – and they’re still coming at us with new regulations.’’

Farmers are like students, feminists and Antivaxxers, in that they are never happy.

As the climate deniers and climate minimalists continue to bleat that climate change is a socialist hoax, or pretend we can’t do anything, or factiously claim ‘the climate always change’ while they continue to spread spiteful disinformation and  malicious lies, the planet is melting…

World registers hottest day ever recorded on July 3

Monday, July 3, was the hottest day ever recorded globally, according to data from the US National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

The average global temperature reached 17.01 degrees Celsius (62.62 Fahrenheit), surpassing the August 2016 record of 16.92C (62.46F) as heatwaves sizzled around the world.

The southern US has been suffering under an intense heat dome in recent weeks. In China, an enduring heatwave continued, with temperatures above 35C (95F). North Africa has seen temperatures near 50C (122F).

And even Antarctica, currently in its winter, registered anomalously high temperatures. Ukraine’s Vernadsky Research Base in the white continent’s Argentine Islands recently broke its July temperature record with 8.7C (47.6F).

…as the world melts, National, ACT, Groundswell and Federated Farmers are promising to do everything to undermine the very little the Greens/Labour have managed.

The level of denial over what is happening and where this is all going is beneath the challenge of the moment…

Damning report finds more than 400,000 New Zealand homes at risk of flooding

Newly released research has found more than 400,000 homes around New Zealand are at risk of flooding.

The report by NIWA and the University of Auckland found 441,384 residential buildings were in flood-prone areas, with a hefty estimated replacement value of $218 billion – a massive 12 percent of New Zealand’s housing value. 

…The Biggest Lie in NZ Politics is that NZ Dairy is the cleanest and greenest in the world when the reality is that it’s a cherry picked nonsense that leaves out pollution so NZ Dairy can get to the numbers to pretend to be clean and green.

Russel Norman’s take down of this Dairy propaganda on The AM Show recently was just ruthless…

“NZ is the biggest seller of a simple commodity called dried milk powder, the cheapest of the cheap, and if you look at what is happening in food production around the world they are looking for more environmentally sound food products.

They are looking for higher value products.

We’ve gone down the pathway of the lowest quality commodity you can produce in the world.

NZ is mid range in terms of its environmental cost per kilogram of milk solids, there is nothing special about it, and we do feed a small number of people compared to the billions on the planet and the economics is very clear that you can be just as profitable if you pull back on the stock rate, pull back on the amount of fertiliser and actually produce a higher product.

Organics is in fact doing incredibly well globally, so why don’t we become a producer of dairy rather than the producer of the cheapest commodity on the planet which results in us trashing our water ways and being big climate producers, that’s a better pathway isn’t it?

…he’s so right!

We always ignore that the 40million number is based on us selling milk powder as a base line ingredient filler for the manufactured food industry. The PR spin pretends it’s wholesome NZ cheese and milk and meat those 40million are eating when the truth is the vast majority of what we export is basic bitch milk powder used as a filler ingredient!

The Climate Crisis was some event we feared at the end of the century, what we are seeing is an unleashing of heat events well beyond what we feared.

There is just no plan to adapt to this new reality when it should be the driving force to begin immediate and radical adaptation for what is coming.

We have no comprehension of what is coming and we are simply not prepared for the age of consequences.

Watching National, ACT and Corporate Farmers use their economic and political muscle to avoid responsibility for what comes next can only be resolved by civil unrest and a campaign of civil disobedience against those interests.

Just consider how the Corporate Farming Lobby have managed to avoid any tax on their pollution since mid 2004!

They have pushed and pushed and pushed it off for 20 years!

National have already promised ANOTHER 5 year extension which will mean the agricultural industry have managed to stop any tax on their pollution for quarter of a century!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Claiming that NZs emissions mean nothing in comparison to China and India isn’t a justification to do nothing, it’s an acknowledgement that radical adaptation is the only move left because those Goliath economies have already doomed us to a dangerous climate change future!

The Left must force a bargain with Farmers for strategically essential reasons.

They are going to feed us when the famine comes.

A recent report on food security found NZ had incredibly low food security because it was so open market driven and refused to subsidise farmers.

Which is where we on the Left must drive the debate.

We should absolutely consider subsidising food grown by NZ farmers and horticulturalists and our seafood and meat and dairy that generates a 15% price reduction for all NZ produce consumed here.

Rebuilding a direct link between the harvest grown here, the people who grow it and a grateful local market who enjoy the product WITH a 15% price reduction.

Climate change will kill global free market supply chains, we are locked into hyper-regionalism. We need to build new economic structures, subsidising NZ kai for the domestic market would lock in certainty for producers while strengthening food security for the population.

We have to find new ways of working together to ensure we can survive what’s coming.

We are a nation of fatherless children raised by angry solo mothers, a low imagination horizon juvenile settler culture built upon stealing indigenous land and polluting it without restraint. A rugged individualism dependent on exploiting a low wage economy and rigging under-regulated capitalism for the rich.

The old greeds, the old hates and the old exploitations will no longer hold the system together if that system is melting in real time.

Super-rich warned of ‘pitchforks and torches’ unless they tackle inequality

Global elite told at London’s Savoy hotel of real risk of ‘civil disruption’ if more is not done to help struggling millions

This is the age of consequences.

They won’t be pleasant.

BTW – the planet is melting…

South-east Australia marine heatwave forecast to be literally off the scale

Australia’s south-east could be in for a marine heatwave that is literally off the scale, raising the prospect of significant losses in fishing and aquaculture.

The Bureau of Meteorology has forecast a patch of the Tasman Sea off Tasmania and Victoria could be at least 2.5C above average from September to February, and it could get hotter.

Oceanographer Grant Smith said the colour-coded scale the bureau uses to map forecast sea surface temperature anomalies stops at 2.5C.

“We didn’t account for anomalies that high when we developed this … it could be 3C, it could be 3.5C, but we can’t see how high it goes,” he said.

 

 

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